I’ve scoured the internet looking for helpful (and easy) map making tutorials.
Check out these 3 great sites:

Check out Spoon Graphic‘s fantastic tutorial on making road maps with Adobe Illustrator. They make it look so easy! Their trick is creating individual brushes for each type of road. This is a real time saver.

Designer Freelance‘s tutorial takes a more manual approach. Their map design includes a hint of terrain, so it’s a bit less abstract/stylized and a tad more labor intensive. They rely heavily on the use of layers in Adobe Illustrator.

While the maps we are making in class are grounded in reality, we can still learn from the world of fantasy map making. Over at Virtual Verduria, they are using Adobe Photoshop to create maps. Their demo for making topographical mountains is particularly helpful, and the image that shows the five Photoshop layers as separate components clearly demonstrates how Photoshop layers work together. It’s a great example.

It is estimated that almost all of the marine pollution in the world is comprised of plastic materials. The average proportion varied between 60% and 80% of total marine pollution.

In many regions in the northern and southern Gyres, plastic materials constitute as much as 90 to 95% of the total amount of marine debris.

Scientists estimate that every year at least 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die when they entangle themselves in plastic pollution or ingest it.

According to Project Aware, 15 billion pounds of plastic are produces in the U.S. every year, and only 1 billion pounds are recycled. It is estimated that in excess of 38 billion plastic bottles and 25 million Styrofoam cups end up in landfill and although plastic bottles are 100% recyclable, on average only 20% are actually recycled.

The Plastiki has created some great infographs to further illustrate the perils of plastic:

Check out Spoon Graphic‘s fantastic tutorial on making road maps with Adobe Illustrator. They make it look so easy! Their trick is creating individual brushes for each type of road. This is a real time saver.

Designer Freelance‘s tutorial takes a more manual approach. Their map design includes a hint of terrain, so it’s a bit less abstract/stylized and a tad more labor intensive. They rely heavily on the use of layers in Adobe Illustrator.

While the maps we are making in class are grounded in reality, we can still learn from the world of fantasy map making. Over at Virtual Verduria, they are using Adobe Photoshop to create maps. Their demo for making topographical mountains is particularly helpful, and the image that shows the five Photoshop layers as separate components clearly demonstrates how Photoshop layers work together. It’s a great example.

A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the different values are represented as colors.

1.5 million Tweets were tracked and distilled down to the cities with the cleanest and naughtiest Tweets. It looks like it’s the dirty south, after all! San Francisco and Cleveland have potty mouths, too.

(In this case, the brightest spots represent the cities that swear the most.)